


swelter and starve

by strixarc



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alcohol, Character Study, Drinking, M/M, One-Sided Attraction, Slice of Life, Smoking, Underage Smoking, Vignette, gavin is a big baby that gets drunk and calls rk900 to tuck him in, i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-09
Updated: 2018-08-09
Packaged: 2019-06-24 05:36:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15623706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strixarc/pseuds/strixarc
Summary: Some habits are hard to break.





	swelter and starve

The first time Gavin Reed had smoked a cigarette, he had been thirteen and sitting on the wooden porch in his friend’s backyard. He doesn’t remember the date, but he remembers that it was hot and muggy – summertime in the Detroit suburbs – and the trees were alive with the sounds of both noisy bugs and the contented birds eating them. He remembers the splintered wood digging into the bare skin on the underside of his legs as he sat on the single step leading down to the grassy fenced in area where two other boys sat, remembers the boy next to him handing him a single cigarette. Gavin doesn’t remember his friend’s name; they separated at the end of middle school and Gavin didn’t see the boy again until a decade later when he was booked for heroin possession. Even then, his once-friend was just a nameless mugshot in a file.

He had been nervous, then, as he sat next to the boy on the step who was sneering to himself as he took another cigarette from the pack. The pack he had stolen from his father, he had boasted proudly. The two boys sitting nearby in the grass shot each other looks and ripped grass out of the ground below them by the handful, holding it up high then watching it fall back to the earth. Gavin remembers taking the offered cigarette cautiously, both afraid of dropping it and afraid of smoking it, as the other boys looked on expectantly. The friend to his side, who couldn’t have been much older than him, let his own cigarette dangle out of his mouth like he had been doing this for years and fished around in his pockets for a lighter. Gavin had held the thing up to his mouth reluctantly, unsure but unwilling to show weakness or half-heartedness in front of his friends, and leaned in so the boy could light him up as well.

The smoke had filled his lungs once he had breathed in – the kid had failed to mention that you shouldn’t breathe in the damn thing on your first go – and almost immediately choked on the breath. His shoulders shook as a coughing fit overtook him and the boy next to him let out a laugh as he lit his own cigarette with ease. Tears welled in Gavin’s eyes as he choked, handing the cigarette to the awaiting boy in the grass close to the step he was perched on. Thankfully, it was the boy’s first time as well, and he made the same mistake Gavin had.

For the next two days after that, Gavin was sick to his stomach. The nicotine rush and beginner’s coughing fit had made his stomach do somersaults in his abdomen spitefully and he had to miss a day of school because he was glued to the toilet in the upstairs bathroom. His mother worried over him and his father waved it off dismissively, but he had never told them the truth. It wasn’t until years later that he allowed his parents to see him smoking and he remembers his mother had cried at the sight. Even then, he was a disappointing son, he supposed.

The nicotine rush was addictive, though, and soon after that he began smoking in earnest. Two packs a day behind his high school, standing against the brick wall of the building as he watched the cars file out of the parking lot. Half a pack after the first time he had sex with his then-girlfriend (Gavin had seen her on one of his first dispatch runs with a wedding ring on her finger and a young kid trailing behind her) in the backseat of his shitty hand-me-down Mustang. An entire pack, chain-smoked, when he found out he had been accepted into the Detroit Police Academy.

Gavin had cut back significantly since then, as he was now quickly approaching forty and needed all the lung capacity he could get, but still enjoyed a couple cigarettes a day. He limited himself to one in the morning when he got up and one in the late evening – or whenever he got home from his shift. He no longer gagged on the smoke he could inhale expertly, nor did he cough up a lung if he trapped the smoke within his chest for a couple seconds. His mother still told him incessantly on her daily mother-child calls that he needed to kick the habit or he would die before she did and he dutifully reminded her that he was a  _ police officer for Christ’s sake _ and would probably die sooner of a bullet than smoking an occasional cigarette. She still worried for him, though, moreso after his father had passed away some years back from pneumonia. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he was grateful that  _ someone _ was trying to look after him. He was grateful that someone so blatantly  _ cared _ about his well-being. Gavin had never been good with words, even as a kid, but he makes sure to bring her flowers every now and then as a token of his thanks.

Sitting in just his boxers and an old t-shirt on the back balcony of his apartment in a shitty plastic chair with his feet up on the hollow metal railing before him, Gavin takes in the sight of Detroit’s nighttime skyline. He takes a drag of the half-gone cigarette held between his index and middle fingers, using the other hand to swirl the contents of the Budweiser bottle next to him. Behind him, with the balcony’s sliding door open, he can hear someone gently close the door to his apartment and he lowers the cigarette from his mouth to let out a large billow of smoke.

“You asked me to come, Detective Reed?”

Gavin pauses, feeling the numbing buzz of the cheap alcohol hum in his mind like the bugs that had livened the trees with their calls so long ago. He takes a long swig of beer, emptying the bottle, and places it down on the small plastic table next to the chair he’s sitting in.

“Yeah. You mind staying with me tonight, Nines?” His eyes are focused on the sharp, dark skyline, but his words are slurred together just slightly. “I’m a little drunk.”

Behind him, he knows that the RK900 unit is furrowing his brows in that constipated and irritating look he gets when he’s processing information. The two had been partners for nearly six months and aside from his mother, “Nines” as he had dubbed the unit (he had a name already, but Gavin was loathe to use it – he felt Caleb was “a name for 4 th graders”) was the only person he felt relatively comfortable letting his guard down around. The two had struck up an unlikely friendship built on sarcasm but a deep-seated understanding of each other; well, Nines had a deep-seated understanding of him. Gavin just enjoyed the constant presence of the android and appreciated the oddly calming effect the man had on him. There might have been more there, something unsaid, but Gavin would rather have had a knife jammed through his dick than be forced to say it out loud. ‘Subdued homoerotic tendencies’, as Nines had labeled it simply, in that prick-ish, matter-of-fact tone.  _ Fuck that guy _ , honestly. Well. You know.

“Gavin,” Nines begins, his voice soft and concerned. Gavin lets out a big sigh, snuffing out his cigarette in the stone ashtray on the table next to him and standing. His legs are like jelly beneath him and he almost trips over the small pile of beer bottles that he had carelessly thrown to the side once he had downed them. Jesus, how much time had passed since he came out here? Instantly, Nines is at his side with his hand wrapped around Gavin’s forearm to steady him. Gavin scoffs and pulls his arm away, lip pulled up in a half-hearted snarl.

“You should stop doing this, Detective.” Nines states.

Gavin ignores him and shuffles into the house, his android partner close behind him to catch him if he feels the world under him start to slip away. Eventually, he finds himself in his bedroom and lets himself fall onto his mattress, letting out a contented sigh and slipping his eyes closed. Behind him, he hears Nines picking up the clothes he had haphazardly thrown onto his floor once he had arrived home from work several hours prior. He resists the urge to roll his eyes behind his lids and instead offers a weary, drunken smirk.

“Porn’s in the cabinet. Keep the sound low, people are tryin’ to sleep around here.”

Gavin can feel the eye-roll aimed in his direction although he can’t see it and hears the door close with a soft click. It takes only a few moments for his body to relax into his mattress and his last thought is of the cigarette dying in the stone ashtray. With Nines closeby, he dreams of sweltering summer days in the suburbs and the bugs singing in the trees.

For just a few hours, he is at peace.

 

**Author's Note:**

> this was rly fun to write ok


End file.
